THE MOST important few days in the history of the St Peter’s Catholic community in Hinckley start this morning with the build-up to the finale of the 250th anniversary celebrations.

THE MOST important few days in the history of the St Peter’s Catholic community in Hinckley start this morning with the build-up to the finale of the 250th anniversary celebrations.

Cyclists left Louvain in Belgium on Monday morning to ride to Hinckley repeating the journey made by Fr Matthew Thomas Norton OP when he established the community on June 29, 1759.

The cyclists aim to be here for the finale of the celebrations, a special Mass to be held on Monday night.

Over two weekends, six members have completed the walks there and back that Fr Norton made in one day to see dying people in Coventry and Leicester, where he also supported the Catholic communities.

From today until Monday, running from 10am to 4pm, there is an exhibition at the church, with a life-size mannequin of Fr Norton.

On Sunday, at the 10am Mass, The Ivorian Choir from the Ivory Coast community in London will sing the mass in full African costume.

At 2pm walkers leave for Aston Flamville - the ancestral home of the Turville family, patrons of the Dominican Order - for a service at 3.30pm in the grounds of the Manor House, where the Dominicans were harboured in secret.

This is an ecumenical service involving Churches Together in Hinckley and music by the Salvation Army Band

At 3.45pm there is a graveside service for Fr Norton led by the Rev Bob Stephen, curate at St Catherines’s Church Burbage and St Peter’s Aston Flamville, featuring St Catherine’s choir, at St Peter’s, Hinckley.

At 4.30pm there is a service led by Captain Julian Rowley of the Salvation Army, with a presentation to all 40 couples in the parish who have been married for 50 years or more. That night, at 8pm, there is the performance of a specially-commissioned play, called In Service of the Truth, by the St Peter’s Players, a cast who are all under the age of 17.

The play explores the meaning of the true cost of living in service of the truth and focuses on the lives of Mother Theresa, Father Jerzy Popielusko, the Solidarity priest and martyr, and Brother Robert Schutz, the murdered founder of the Taize ecumenical community in southern France

On Monday at 7pm the Anniversary Mass will be celebrated by the Rt Rev Malcolm MacMahon OP, Bishop of the Diocese of Nottingham, the first Dominican Bishop for over 200 years, in the presence of over 60 priests of the Diocese of Nottingham and Birmingham and the Prior Provincial of the Dominican Order, Father John Farrell OP.

There will be a congregation of 500, including the modern day heirs of the Turville family and a descendant of Charlotte Brame, the 19th century novelist and member of St Peter’s congregation.